The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) is rolling out Microsoft's hosted communication and collaboration service, Microsoft [email protected], over the next three months to roughly 7.5 million students and faculty at more than 10,000 institutions throughout India. The new contract is one Microsoft's largest cloud deployments to date.

"Microsoft's cloud platform will make for a truly progressive ecosystem and contribute to the country's technical education by providing a better communication and collaboration platform for institutes and students," said Dr. S. S. Mantha, chairman of AICTE in a prepared statement released last week by Microsoft.

AICTE is the governing body for technical education in India and is a member of India's Ministry of Human Resource Development.

AICTE evaluated a number of vendors, including IBM and Google, before awarding the contract to Microsoft. Deployment has begun and is expected to be finished by summer 2012.

About the Author

Kanoe Namahoe is online editor for 1105 Media's Education Group. She can be reached at [email protected].